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Cecil Beaton in New York

Almost anyone would have hankered to have a personal portrait shot by Cecil Beaton. He made his subjects, many of them distinguished or celebrated to begin with, seem impeccably elegant and disarmingly good-looking, seldom employing any of the irony or social commentary that other photographers often used.

Now comes a coffee-table book, accompanying an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, that contains some of the finest photographs Beaton took during his many sojourns in New York, as well as sketches, designs and caricatures that this aesthetically versatile artist drew for the movies, theater, opera and fashion. It is a pleasure to leaf through the thick ­pages of ­CECIL BEATON: The New York Years (­Museum of the City of New York/Skira/­Rizzoli, $65) and see Greta Garbo at her mysterious peak and Marilyn Monroe at her most luscious. Brando, Astaire, Warhol, Capote, Callas, Coco, Liz — people recognizable by a single name — flocked to Beaton or were lobbied by him.

Like Capote, Beaton was not well-born but became a high-society favorite, and he paid his patrons back with opulent portraits — the ones of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt and Lee Radziwill and her daughter, Anna Christina, are dazzling. The book also reminds us that it was Beaton who designed the lavish Edwardian gowns for both the play and the film “My Fair Lady,” the belle époque excess of “Gigi” and the lushly feathered tutus for Balanchine’s “Swan Lake.”

Photo

Audrey Hepburn in costume for the film "My Fair Lady."Credit
Photograph from “Cecil Beaton”; courtesy of the Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s

As the concise text by Donald Albrecht, the museum’s curator of architecture and design, points out, Beaton, educated at Harrow and Cambridge, turned himself into a dandy like Oscar Wilde, with a highly cultivated Old World style and manner and an exaggerated accent. In 1928, at age 24, he sailed into New York Harbor, and a playful, acrobatic self-portrait taken on the Brooklyn Bridge a year or so later suggests why he charmed everyone he met. Everyone, of course, meant the wealthy and famous, since Beaton, as Albrecht says, had “a snobbish obsession with class and status.”

“I only photograph those I know and admire,” he said, in an unguarded statement.

Ambitious and a canny networker, but possessed of a penetrating eye for stylishness, he impressed tastemakers. His photographs were soon gracing Vogue and Vanity Fair — in time helping to generate the glamour that Depression-era New York needed, just as it needed the lift of a flamboyant Busby Berkeley movie. An anti-Semitic joke that he included in the margins of an illustration a year before World War II lost him the Vogue account, but he regained his stature with a famous photograph of a young girl with a bandaged head clutching a doll and sitting up in a hospital bed in the days of the London blitz. Today it seems highly romanticized, possibly even staged, in the manner of a Norman Rockwell painting, but it landed on the cover of Life and became a powerful symbol of what Britain was enduring.

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Though homosexual, he was for a time the lover of the world’s most beautiful woman, Garbo. Beaton even proposed marriage.

The Monroe session shows that Beaton, who died in 1980, was not all glistening surface. His tender portrait of her lying on a bed or divan captures her frightened core, the fragility beneath the voluptuousness. But Beaton could not help going over the top — as in (in his words) the “orgy of Edwardian luxury” he dreamed up for a production of Wilde’s play “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” because he felt audiences “were starved for bright colors, rich silks and artificial flowers.”

“Beaton,” Albrecht tells us, “reveled in the elongated silhouettes and big-brimmed hats of his beloved Edwardian youth.” That sensibility informed all his work, giving it an air of artifice rather than earthy naturalness. But impresarios of theater, opera and ballet knew that rich splendor was red meat for audiences at, say, “La Traviata” or “Turandot.” And no one did splendor better than Beaton. ­

A version of this review appears in print on December 4, 2011, on Page BR28 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Photography. Today's Paper|Subscribe